A society that decides the merit and worth of everything by its utility is not a good society.
And yet that’s the sort of society we are choosing to live in – because it makes the rich richer, which has become the actual de facto goal of just about everything no matter what platitudes are mouthed on the news.
There’s evidence of this utilitarian focus everywhere: common core, diminishment of humanities studies, running universities as businesses, our mediocre budgets for arts, our disdain for fundamental research.
Nearly the entire flood of public-facing propaganda is designed to facilitate this as it busily informs us that if you aren’t directly in the service of making some rich white man richer, you are contemptible and have no reason to live.
Teacher? Parasite. Artist? Worthless. Research scientist? Garbage. Scholar? Shouldn’t get paid for doing something you love! Astronomer? Hope there is some hard currency on Alpha Centauri!
Perhaps a society can operate long-term like ours. Perhaps. But it won’t be a very joyful or interesting place to live.
People won’t read sf of dystopic fiction, and yet will resignedly live in such an environment with no complaint. I must say that fact does puzzle me.
No irony, I assume, that this post immediately follows FYPM. I’m tempted to claim that I’m as passionate about programming as you are about proofreading, but I might never know for sure, as I am an amateur programmer. I follow your blog quite closely, in part because of your recurring recommendation to people similar to me to tune out the purple squirrel rhetoric and carry oneself like someone with 3+ years experience. I try. I really do.
But I also have nightmares about cynical monetization models based on “pain points,” “sucker lists,” “in-app purchases” etc. I want a job that won’t insult my intelligence, but I also want to be able to sleep. Surely there must also be commercial coding problems dealing with nuts and bolts functions such as accounting or engineering, but what percentage of the total would that be? Does anyone even know? If so, are they at liberty to tell? Without having to kill me?
As I write I’m staring at two applications. One is an electrical apprenticeship application I picked up at the IBEW local, where I dutifully stood in line for five hours on the first working Monday of the month. The other is an online form at the website of LaunchCode, a nonprofit technology accelerator that aims to get nontraditional folks into internship and mentoring and the like in IT.
The culture we live in preaches endlessly that a person and their talents are effectively flushed down a rathole if they are not “paid for doing what they love,” but I’m starting to question that. Oh hell, I’m so jaded by now that I fully reject it. Surely the amateur linguist in you realizes that the root word of “amateur” is love. Just now I was staring at a textarea in the LaunchCode form captioned “Tell us about yourself and why you want this. (1000 characters or less)*” As is often the case when afflicted with writer’s block, I alttabbed to Thunderbird to check blog feeds and I encounter your two most recent gems on the mercenary nature of our current social situation. I worry that by losing “amateur status” I’ll lose the love. I also worry that I’ll never log the proverbial 10,000 hours or whatever it is as an amateur (although I understand you understand that to be BS) or at any rate that they’ll be 10,000 hours of self-assigned projects and therefore somehow not challenging enough to find my true potential. I try to imagine myself as a professional electrician and amateur programmer. While my programming skills will probably remain underdeveloped, at least I’ll have the freedom to at least try to apply them to things I believe in, such as information asymmetry coutermeasures, exploring the intersection of “big data” and “public domain,” reverse engineering business models, and building non-monetized websites. Can you give me a rough guesstimate of what % of paid IT work is the exact opposite of the things on that brief list? What percentage of such jobs would actually prevent me from involving myself in the “greater good.” Don’t answer if you’d have to kill me, of course. The thing is, being an amateur anything requires non-zero leisure time. I don’t expect that in an apprenticeship, but I know myself to be very patient and diligent in situations where there’s a probable light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t know about work beyond that. It seems that jobs in general are either part time jobs way below the poverty line, or else killer positions that mandate killer overtime and tear people away from their families and their amateur pursuits. As an allocation problem it’s a no brainer, but of course no amount of brains can possibly match the efficiency of the invisible hand at allocation problems. Riiiiiiiight.
In our system, there is no choice but to compromise somewhere. It was ever thus, but what makes it so distressing — so offensive — now is that we could live in a world of plenty if we chose to do so. It’s that divergence between the realization (sub rosa in most people) and the actuality of the daily grinds we are all subject to that makes for so much unhappiness I think. At least that’s my idea about it. Way back in the 1930s, Keynes recognized that we were moving to and could have a world of near-leisure with work at a minimum. He wasn’t wrong, but all that effort, all that sweat and toil, went to making others rich.
“Can you give me a rough guesstimate of what % of paid IT work is the exact opposite of the things on that brief list? ”
Most IT work is scutwork, but it really depends on where you work I think and at what level. My partner got to work on a lot of pretty interesting though difficult things in the programming field at her latest job. But she also got a lot of unpleasant work, too.
As for me, it has been about 60% unpleasant “bullshit” work as David Graeber would put it, and 40% interesting things like network design or opening a new office or things like that — things that I actually like.
The field I almost entered after my military stint was journalism. That would’ve been a huge mistake. Glad I did not do that, as I would’ve had a much different life.
In my previous job, I was often walking into failed companies and knowing that most people I was seeing would be laid off. Most of them weren’t really doing any work at all (the insurance business is odd), but knowing that we have no real safety net and a lot of the older people there (because their skills were also old) would likely not be able to find another job didn’t make that a very comfortable situation. I know it was worse for them.
Well, I’m rambling, but the whole economy is organized to compromise moral principles, to make all of us complicit in an immoral system, and to cause us to valorize the indefensible. I can see that even in myself, and I don’t know how to avoid it and still function.